‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’: When Joan Baez turned the brilliance of Bob Dylan’s words against him
Bob Dylan never talks about what his lyrics are about. Throughout his career, he’s largely evaded the press to evade any questions about what his songs are getting at or what stories are within them. It means that nothing can ever go any further than a rumour as fans have theorised who or what certain songs might be addressing. They attempt to piece together a puzzle of gossip as they try to understand the artist. However, there is something in the way Joan Baez sings his songs that feels like an essential piece, as if through her own mouth, possibly telling her side, everything fits together.
Whatever happened between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez will be a mystery fans have been pondering for decades and still will for many more. There arguably is no Dylan without Baez as she found him as a nobody, picked him up and put him on stage, introducing him to the folk world and thus the music world at large as they dueted their way around the festival circuit.
Both have their own take on it. To Dylan, it was a case of infatuation and admiration only affected by busy schedules. “She had that heart-stopping soprano voice, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” he said of those early days but later admitted, “I was just trying to deal with the madness that had become my career, and unfortunately, she got swept up along, and I felt very bad about it,” adding, “I was sorry to ever see our relationship ever end.”
To Baez, that was true in part as she said, “I think that his fame happened so fast, and it was so huge, that I kind of got lost in the shuffle.” But it was something more than that. As Dylan got married behind her back during their ongoing will-they-won’t-they romance, his tour manager reported him saying, “Joan won’t be there when I want her. She won’t do it when I want to do it”, as if all Dylan wanted was a subservient wife, not a creative equal.
Baez clearly felt that sting. On ‘Diamonds and Rust’, her opus about the whole romance, she sings about it all, from Dylan’s sly dissing of her lyrical work or underappreciation of her career and talent to his sudden boom of fame off the back of her help to his enduring presence in her life despite his dismissal of her love.
But there is something about Baez’ rendition of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ that seems to hold all those emotions. Throughout their creative partnership, the duo would always be found singing Dylan’s sounds as Baez let her voice to his work repeatedly. Her vocals stand in such a stark contrast to his own. While his are strange, often gruff, Baez sounds like an angel, landing her the nickname of the “madonna” and making her the star of the scene. It feels like no matter what words she’s singing, her vocals bring feeling to them, bringing them to life in a new way that Dylan himself could never quite manage.
That’s best proved with ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ as a song that clearly holds a lot of emotion, but that the songwriter never quite put across on his own take. Written in 1962, the track is a breakup song. It’s a heartbreaking song, penned right as Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, moved abroad to Italy.
As with all of his relationships, it was a complex one. Rotolo was there as a muse during his early days. Her move to Italy inspired some of his great aching love songs like ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ and ‘One Too Many Morning’. But at the same time, the artist never truly appreciated his partner. As his fame grew, he grew more and more difficult, pulling away from her and starting his affair with Baez. “I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solid ground. I was on quicksand and very vulnerable,” she said of that time period.
So when the song was released, with the already confusing and somewhat hurtful lyrics about their relationship, treating it with a strange mix of tenderness and flippancy, and them almost immediately Dylan was on stage singing it alongside Baez; no doubt the experience was probably pretty horrible for Rotolo. But that emotional side of the song wouldn’t be guess from Dylan’s original. As a writer, he was clearly more than capable of translating big feelings into poetry. But as a singer, his rendition is pretty one note.
All of that is exactly why Baez’ take feels so much richer. Not only do her vocals add such a polish to the song, seeing her take more interesting choices when it comes to inflections and note changes. But when following the origin of the song through this early relationship with Rotolo, her being positioned first as the ‘other woman’ and then essentially having the exact same experience, her rendition feels full of genuine emotion.
“I give her my heart, but she wanted my soul,” she sings so beautifully, but it’s gut-wrenching, now knowing that Dylan likely could write the exact same line about her, that he loved her but wasn’t willing to commit or give her everything.
It’s in the final lines, though, that Baez claims this song as her own. Beating out Dylan’s original as a performance and elevating it with more emotion, she delivers the closing verse with a bite that the songwriter didn’t seem to have the emotional capacity to fulfil. “I ain’t saying you treated me unkind / You could’ve done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice, it’s all right,” Baez sings, turning Dylan’s words back on him so beautifully that his claim on them seems to fall by the wayside.
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